Word: dietz
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...Coop that had the money. Early in 1964, it announced plans for a $1.3 million textbook annex on the West Side of the street. Dietz promptly sent declarations of war to every Coop director -- copies of God's Own Junkyard, and book of photographs of urban and rural blight...
...Coop's plans were all wrong, Dietz argued before the Cambridge City Council, the Cambridge Board of Zoning Appeals, Governor Endicott Peabody '42 (an old football friend), and a Massachusetts Superior Court. There was no reason, he said, to accept the assurances of Coop directors--some of them Harvard officials -- that their plans were the best possible. "Intelligence in one particular field," he wrote at the time, "is not generally transferable...
...even made one quixotic attempt to rouse the community. A few weeks before the Coop's annual meeting in 1964, Dietz announced that he would nominate nine Harvard and M.I.T. professors to oppose the official nominees for the Board of Directors. None of the professors had been told in advance about the honor. At the meeting, be haranged a crowd of applauding students for five minutes and closed with what he said was a poem...
Hold fast old noble Dietz...
That was the pattern for Dietz's entire effort: the more spectacular his methods, the less spectacular his results. He collected hundreds of signatures for a petition to save an old carpenter shop on the annex site. The Coop bulldozed it. He pleaded with Cambridge City councilors to outlaw a bridge the Coop wanted to build across Palmer Street. The Coop has built...